Not An Important Failure
by Shade Embry
Summary: CTU's tech expert is pulled to District for a day. Will it finally change her into someone she doesn't want to be?
1. Moving Into Shadows

TITLE: Not An Important Failure  
  
AUTHOR: Brittany "Thespis" Frederick  
  
E-MAIL: baltimorelt@yahoo.com  
  
RATING: PG for language  
  
CATEGORY: Drama, Vignette  
  
SUMMARY: Liz is pulled to District, forced to collaborate with Mason, Ryan Sealey and Chappelle. What does it say about her?  
  
ORIGINAL CHARACTER BIO: Liz Rycoff is CTU's Chief of Technology. She is close friends with Jack and with George Mason, and has a political alliance with Mason, who wants her to go to work for him at District, but Liz's loyalty to Jack holds her back.  
  
  
  
He looked at her across the top of his coffee mug. Teri stood off to the side, waiting to weigh in on the whole affair. Even Kim had taken notice. But Jack looked at her for a moment impassively.  
  
"It can't be that bad."  
  
"There's Mason, Sealey, Chappelle…" she counted them off on her fingers, leaning against the kitchen counter and hoping she hadn't been a horrible houseguest and ruined the evening.  
  
"You like Mason," Jack reasoned and stayed emotionless about that.  
  
"And I have nothing against Sealey, not yet," she emphasized the yet, "but I want to see Chappelle crucified, Jack, you know that. And it's not my place. Those people, what some of them have become…"  
  
"It's just a day. It's not like they're going to corrupt you because you've used their keyboard."  
  
"Yeah, I suppose you're right." She exhaled. "I've made a big deal out of nothing, haven't I?"  
  
Teri shook her head. "It's all right, Liz. You're just looking out for yourself. I mean, you don't want to be blinded by something you could have seen."  
  
Liz nodded, looking at the kitchen tile for a moment. Then she looked at Jack. "If that's what they want. If it's okay with you, of course. Then I'll go."  
  
"It's fine. You'll be fine."  
  
But she didn't feel fine. Liz felt decidedly out of it as she walked in the front doors of District. She had been there many times before, working with Mason, running information to him, coming when she was asked. But she always was a CTU agent first, wearing that identity like a badge. Today she felt alien, for today she would be one of the people she passed in the halls and wondered if they were who they said they were. And it made her feel like she had left herself behind just by standing there.  
  
"You're early," Mason said as he met her in the lobby. What he didn't know was that she ordinarily came in around this time at CTU. It was only considered early by District standards. He began to walk her toward the main floor. "We're trying to get the new system up and running. Someone can brief you on that. Then we want to run some sims and make sure it works."  
  
Liz nodded carefully. "I can do that," she said, not mentioning that at CTU they didn't have to double-check to make sure if something worked. They were more trusting than that.  
  
But Mason didn't notice her ulterior thoughts. Instead, he scanned the main District working floor until he spotted the two men he was looking for. He waved them over.  
  
One was, of course, his boss, the man he despised but pretended to respect, the insidious Ryan Chappelle. Chappelle knew Liz, and the two shook hands cordially. She was a statistic, a body, to him and he was a disgrace to her, but for now they lied to themselves.  
  
The other man was CTU's liaison, dark-haired and Mason's height, a man in his early thirties. Ryan Sealey. Jack knew him, and she knew of him, but she'd never met him. He had a firm handshake.  
  
"What's the liaison doing on this?" she asked him.  
  
"The systems check? I'm not here for that."  
  
"What are you here for?"  
  
"Rumor has it there's going to be something going down in Coronado today."  
  
Liz looked to Mason. "You didn't tell me that," she said.  
  
"Well, that would be because someone didn't tell me." He obviously meant Chappelle, who had long since walked off.  
  
She separated herself from Sealey and Mason and started into the wide, bustling space that was District's main floor. A Coronado alert, a new system run. She knew that was less than half of the truth, and wondered what role she had to play. Mason had not brought her here just to debug his systems, had not personally pulled her off active CTU assignment for the day to do what any Electronic Crimes Bureau staffer could do. No, he wanted her for a specific purpose, and this time even he wasn't telling her what she deserved to know.  
  
She had once wondered if she had crossed the line between agent and bureaucrat. She was walking on that line, she knew. And this day might very well involuntarily push her directly over. But Liz Rycoff did her job. No matter what that was.  
  
No matter what secrets might be hiding in its manifesto…  
  
-To Be Continued- 


	2. Breaking The Silence

Not An Important Failure  
  
Segment Two  
  
  
  
She had been told in his many appeals to her skill by Mason that District needed a strong Chief of Technology and was suffering thoroughly in its Technology section. Joining up with the staffers she would work with for the day as she plugged in to a spare computer, Liz saw no reason to disagree.  
  
Frost, Canton and Cassini seemed to have been promoted out of sheer numbers. None of them had passed through ECB, instead moving up through Technology departments at various Agency units. Cassini had been Assistant Chief at L.A. Field, Canton and Frost Chief and Assistant at Phoenix Field. They were obviously familiar with the machines, but not with the goals and aims their skills were required for, and she thought that it showed.  
  
She looked at the profile folder. "This looks easy enough. Shouldn't be a problem."  
  
"That's good news." Canton seemed amused. Like his compatriots, he was a middle-aged, red-blooded male with a thin layer of professionalism over a distinct freelance core.  
  
Frost punched him in the shoulder. "You may want to show some respect. She was involved in the breakdown of the Carnivore program."  
  
Canton glanced over at her, but Liz simply glanced up from her file at both of them. How did anyone tolerate these people? She pulled out the keyboard and used her District-issued alias ID to log in. "Let's get started," she said, slipping a CD into the player. The others were staring at her now. "Don't tell me you've never heard of listening to music while you work," she said.  
  
Cassini blinked. "Depends on what it is."  
  
"You'll find out. Now open up a socket and log on to your admin accounts, bring up your files," Liz said, listening to the opening chords of a particular song and letting her hands do the work while a small portion of her mind wandered elsewhere.  
  
The song, a slow hit by The Devlins, began to play.  
  
*You say you're one of the people, but the people get you down  
  
Asking too many questions, you don't like them coming around  
  
What's the point of living if you're not forgiving?  
  
What's the point of being here?*  
  
"You with us?" Canton asked with a little too much edge.  
  
"Shut up or I'll shove that keyboard down your throat. Now do your damn job and upload your files," Liz snapped angrily, always having had thin patience.  
  
Canton, Cassini and Frost were thus cowed, staring at her. Standing across the room with Sealey, Mason was staring at her too, though he was far less surprised. She ignored all the glances and turned back to her work. And they wanted to blame CTU for the collapse? Maybe they should look at themselves first.  
  
She looked at the range of files, began to feed them through a subprogram she had brought from CTU on a Zip disk. It would take some time. Meanwhile, she opened up a socket and began a search for the Coronado case Sealey had spoken of.  
  
No secrets, no lies.  
  
*…and they shot him in the street, now they made him a hero  
  
What's the point of being if you're just not seeing things?  
  
What's the point of being here?*  
  
"We'll wait till this scan assembles the fine code and then we'll simulate it," she told the others carefully.  
  
"Don't you want to build the complete code, then simulate it?" Frost asked her, careful to speak without anything that she might yell at him for in his voice.  
  
"A full simulation's going to take us hours. This way we can be more precise and do it piece by piece." She turned away, again finding Mason looking at her from across the room. His eyes were questioning, as if to wonder about her. Let him wonder all he wanted.  
  
When no one was looking, she went back to her second socket, assuming that there would be a full and authorized file waiting for her. Any mission that existed under the auspice of the Agency had to have one.  
  
But her search had returned no results.  
  
Officially, the Coronado case file did not exist. So what was Ryan Sealey trying to hide from the Agency that he would tell her to her face? And what role did Mason play in it?  
  
But when Liz looked up to find them, both men were suddenly gone.  
  
-To Be Continued- 


	3. Something Inwardly Untrue

Not An Important Failure  
  
Segment Three  
  
A/N: This latest battery of segments goes out to Medie for the great reviews which inspired me (and a great XF/24 crossover that puts my "Like A Fallen Constellation" to shame).  
  
In case you haven't figured it out from the subtle hint in Segment One, I was thinking of Vince Vaughn to play Sealey, which will become more apparent as we go on.  
  
Also, I apologize if my stride is off – 24 withdrawl will do that to you...  
  
  
  
She wasn't surprised when the call came an hour later after she'd yelled at her "support staff" for the fourth time and Chappelle looked about ready to have her fired. But it was Mason who made the call and not Chappelle.  
  
"Liz, can I see you in my office for a second?" he said.  
  
Obediently, she stood, although warily because she did not want to leave "the deranged in charge of the databanks" as she so eloquently often put it back at CTU. She glared at her District-issue subordinates even as she turned to face Mason. "Yeah, sure," she said, adding warningly, "We've got a couple things we need to talk about."  
  
Mason blinked, never able to hold a staring contest with Elisabeth Rycoff, but his gaze hardened around the edges as he waited for her, then walked with her in silence the short distance to his District office, closing and locking the door behind them both.  
  
"What has gotten into you today?" he said, staring at her fiercely.  
  
She stared back. "What is this Coronado non-case you're hiding?"  
  
"Elisabeth," he warned.  
  
"Okay, number one: I am acting as a responsible agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Number two: the people I am working with are probably a threat to national security due to their own stupidity unless they are kept controlled, please refer back to number one. Number three: you've never lied to me, George, so don't you start now." Liz was fuming inside and fought to keep it down. "It's not clean enough to put an official report on, but Ryan Sealey will tell me what it is, so the question remains: *what the hell is it*?"  
  
She stared him down, the implicit threat in her eyes: she would know if he lied. She would walk out on him if he did. And she knew he'd screwed up in his past at least once – with the Darcet bank account – and if he was doing it again, she would not only cold-cock him, but report him to Internal Section. Her code of ethics was so sharp you could cut yourself with it.  
  
So Mason bit the bullet.  
  
"The Coronado case hasn't had its report filed yet, and from what Sealey has told me, they don't want it on the wire. With the rumors of a mole at least this level, they're afraid to botch it." He put up a hand, reading her next thought. "Which is, yes, why you're here. If they needed someone, I wanted an expert. Do those three look like experts to you?"  
  
"Not in the slightest," she muttered. "Why can't you say this to my face, George? You could have saved me all the threatening remarks."  
  
"They bring out vibrance in your personality." Seeing she wasn't inclined to joke this moment, he downshifted. "Do you really think Sealey wants me to tell everyone that asks? He was standing right there."  
  
"He hasn't been standing over my shoulder all day, George. Admit that you screwed up."  
  
"Fine, I dropped the ball. Now will you please admit you're edgy today?"  
  
"I am not – fine, I'm edgy." She ran a hand through her hair. "I shouldn't be here."  
  
"Well, you are here, so deal with it. I'll let you know if anything else happens." Mason walked her to the door and watched her go. Watched her walk right into Ryan Sealey. Speak of the devil. Mason stood in the doorway and inwardly crossed his fingers watching the denouement. Part of him didn't want Liz to do something asinine and be hurt for it. And another part of him was motivated by a different kind of fear. 


End file.
